The more we change
by Darke Eco Freak
Summary: The more fucked up things get, really, that's all there is to it. I mean, look at me, I was an assassin in training, a bartender, assassin again then I died. Now, I'm well, I let you figure that part out because truthfully, I ain't got a clue.
1. To the end

**DEF: I admit the characters might be OOC in this but really this fic is just a convoluted attempt to satisfy my obsession with AC and Prototype. Rated mainly for cursing, not canon compliant to Prototype 2, mostly because I hate Heller and there are mild spoilers for the end of Assassin's Creed III.  
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_Shivanni: Neither Assassin's Creed nor Prototype belong to DEF, as if that wasn't obvious. We apologize for any character inconsistencies as we've played none of the games mentioned, sadly. Also this is mild slash, so if you don't like to read about guys kissing, kindly get out.  
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Sometimes the more human part of him would be horrified by the things he was able to do now, and he didn't mean the killing. He had **_died_** for fuck's sake, he should be six feet under with a nice tombstone and maybe some flowers, but no, here he still was, up and running about with more energy than the fucking Energizer Bunny. Well, at least they had kept to some sort of consistency, he was still wanted by several armed forces and he was still killing, however, the way in which he could kill now was almost disturbing, nearly as disturbing as the one who'd made all of it possible.

Alex, Alex had done this to him, Alex had saved him, brought his body and most of his mind back from the dead, saved him from the self-sacrificing death he had chosen. He wasn't even sure whether or not he should thank or curse the virus, he had been _ready_ to die, he had been tired beyond anything he could explain. Tired of living his life as nothing more than a vessel for long dead ancestors and crazy otherworldly beings who had no other way to occupy their time than to try to take over the world. He had been ready, ready to make up for generations of fighting and suffering, but now, now he wasn't even human anymore, he wasn't Desmond Miles anymore.

He didn't need to sleep, or eat, or use the bathroom, he didn't feel pain anymore, it was as if he had been revived behind a thick, impregnable wall of ice. He could see the world around him with amazing clarity, hear, taste, touch, all of his senses so much more sensitive but without pain, the sweet burning of his muscles after sparring, the mind shattering agony of falling several stories, it was almost worthless. Sure he might not have enjoyed the many near death experiences, at least as far as he remembered, but it had at least proved he was a living breathing human. Now he didn't need to breathe and he was damn sure '**alive**' didn't apply to what he was.

Even the accursed Bleeding Effect had died with his body, and along with it, all of his Ancestral memories. Technically, he was still a Master Assassin with all of the **_muscle_** memory and now he had the actual muscle to accomplish all of it, only a million times better than any human ever could, Master Assassin or no but he had no idea how he'd learned any of it. Oh sure he knew all about Juno and the Animus but that was only because Shaun and Rebecca had shown him the tapes of his Animus sessions.

Still, it never mattered that he'd committed all of it to memory, to **_his_** memory; it hadn't rung any bells in his head and he'd watched it all with a sense of detachment. The memories made no more impression on him than a videogame, one with an exceptionally compelling storyline, but a game all the same. He couldn't remember what it was to be Altair, or Ezio, or Connor. To think that he had lived as them, that he had worn their skins and knew their hopes, aspirations, dreams, vices, pleasures, **_everything_**, and now he didn't left him feeling oddly empty and no amount of new memory could fix it.

Sometimes he wished Shaun and Rebecca had never filled him in on the life of Desmond Miles, that Desmond had been left in peace even if his body was up and running about again. In a sense, Desmond _was_ still dead, technically he was a new strain of the Blacklight virus titled Goldlight. He had woken up on a table with William, Shaun, Rebecca and Alex standing around him, he'd seen every emotion from delight to disgust to worry to empathy to stone cold apathy on those faces and he still couldn't tell which had been worse. However, it wasn't as bad as hearing he'd been dead for nearly a year, a year since he'd sacrificed himself to save the world and release Juno, a year since Desmond had left this world.

Slowly, the pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place, but in the absolutely wrong places. He was, had been, Desmond Miles, descendent of a long line of assassins whose memories he had unlocked and relived in an attempt to prevent the destruction of the world. He had died in the December of 2012, in June of 2013, Dr. Alexander Jonathon Mercer released the Blacklight virus into Penn station, the outbreak lasted less than a month. In December 2013, the Blacklight virus codename: Zues reanimated the body of deceased assassin Desmond Miles.

No one had known why the virus that had terrorized New York for weeks and had been thought dead after a nuclear explosion would suddenly come out of hiding to steal the body of a dead assassin of all things. Half the order had gone ballistic, searching the globe for the body of one of their most important brothers, dead or alive, Desmond still had the DNA of long dead Masters, for all they knew the Templars might be able to develop a way to search their memories without a living host and they shuddered to think what they could do with that knowledge. No one had filled him in on the specifics of how the order even managed to find him but he knew there had been copious amounts of bloodshed, between Alex, the Order, Blackwatch and, yes, the Templars as well because they could never leave well enough alone. No one other than Shaun and Rebecca knew why Alex had kidnapped his corpse, and preferred it that way.

He stared out at the hundreds of infected that ran rampant through New York City, or as Blackwatch had renamed it NYZ. It was strange, he had worked so hard to save these people, to prevent anything like this ever happening to them, to the innocent, to the ignorant and now here he was, part of the reason they were like this. He had, well no, _Desmond Miles_ had worked so hard against this, but then, he wasn't Desmond anymore, was he? He was a fucking shade of the man, of the assassin, it was actually sad how accurate his codename was, Hades, who else but the Lord of the fucking Underworld?

To add more fuel to the god damned fire, he was not only able to consume people like Alex, but he could reanimate corpses and control them, he was going to help bring about the fucking Zombie Apocalypse! He supposed it fit as he'd been brought back as well, and in nearly the exact same way. The sad part about it all? He wanted to do it, he wasn't Desmond, he was the Goldlight virus, he shared Alex's views on most of humanity, they were selfish, ignorant, arrogant swine, most of them would sell out their own mother before they accepted death. Desmond and his order had been part of the .001% of the planet to actually give a shit for others, but it wasn't enough.

He was sorry to be disappointing Altair, and Ezio, Connor, Malik, Leonardo, Maria, Rosa, Achilles, and god knows how many others, but he wasn't Desmond anymore, he wasn't their saving grace anymore. He was something else, something different, he and Alex both were, and if the rest of them couldn't see it, then it was their own damn fault. They still treated him like they had Desmond, they couldn't get it through their heads that he had changed, fuck, he wasn't even a real he anymore, he was an it.

"Des."

He pressed his lips into a hard line, refusing to meet Alex's eyes. They were both monsters, killers, hell, he'd been that even before his reanimation and Alex had been willing to kill thousands because they had wanted to kill him, they had both lived by a rather basic rule 'Get them before they get you' and if that failed 'Go out with a bang'. They had both been fucked up even before the viruses, all of this was just a continuation in a long line of bullshitery. Still, it gave Hades little peace to know the human known as Desmond Miles was dead when the Goldlight virus was alive with a few broken memories and his face.

"Desmond's dead and you know it."

"So is Alex but no chance in hell am I going by Zeus."

He grinned at the other then, pulling him into a vicious kiss. Maybe some things were better off left in the past, such as Desmond Miles, the assassin, and Dr. Alexander Jonathon Mercer, Gentec scientist. However, he didn't see any harm in picking up where Des, the bartender, and Alex, the too sexy regular, left off because, really, some things just never changed.

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**DEF: I know the whole Blacklight/Redlight fiasco was supposed to happen before Desmond's sacrifice but I took some liberties with the timeline, how else would this work out anyway? I mean, Alex wouldn't have spent three-four years doing jack squat.  
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_Shivanni: We know this is probably bordering on Mary-Sue-ish but we couldn't help ourselves, there are too many fics out there where Des is too severely outclassed by Alex in the physical department. We don't care how gentle Alex is with him, he could hurt Des, also, we wanted to keep to keep to AC's timeline more than Prototype's. If you liked it, review, who knows, she might write more.  
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	2. From the beginning

**DEF: Mostly written because I couldn't get this out of my head, that and I thought Alex deserved some sort of input in this madness.  
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_Bale: This story is an AU of Prototype, it follows the first game but deviates where Alex recovered from the Nuke, Heller makes absolutely no appearance here. We own neither Prototype nor Assassin's Creed, sadly.  
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There are some things in this world no one could ever be prepared for, it doesn't matter if you're a US Marine, a scientist at Area 51 or a regular NYC citizen. Some things are just too impossible, too unbelievable, just too far out of the realm of human imagination that no one would ever think it could happen, and if you did, then you were fucked in the head. Alexander Jonathon Mercer was, **_is_**, is one of those things.

A brilliant young scientist with a less than perfect childhood of living with an alcoholic, negligent mother and younger sister, still, all of that aside, he still managed to get out of the abject poverty he spent most of his short life in to work on top secret military projects. No one would ever guess the horrors that would be unleashed by that handsome young man, the one with the classic boy next door looks. Who would think that behind those chic name brand glasses, through those lovely cobalt blue orbs a monster hid in plain sight?

What sane person would ever being to speculate the death such careful hands would be able to produce, the horror slender pianist's fingers would bring about, or the curses that would be spewed from perfectly full lips? The death and horror that Alexander would cause was the stuff of nightmares, but the creature he created was so much more than that. The creature that walked around with his face, that searched for the memories of a dead scientist, of its maker, almost like a new-age version of Frankenstein.

Alexander Jonathon Mercer had worked on the blacklight virus, helped change and nurture it until it was a much more deadly weapon than anyone ever imagined, than anyone had ever thought could exist. Alex Mercer was the product of his work, **_I_** am the product of his work, I am the Blacklight virus, codename: Zeus. I don't know what my purpose is and I have none of Alexander's memories despite consuming several of the people he worked with and for, I still don't know who **_he_** was.

Now though, I don't think I want to know, it's not that he was a monster, a selfish son of a bitch without a care in the world for anyone else. Fuck, when he broke that vial, he could have been damning his own sister to a life worse than death, but did he give a shit? Not a chance. I don't care about any of that, I've done far worse than him by now, I've killed hundreds of people, there are a thousand whispering voices in my head that are all that's left of the humans they once were. I've been labelled a terrorist and monster, an it, and in all fairness, I am.

However, there's only one thing left over from Dr. Mercer's life that bothers me, something I can't exactly pinpoint because, hey, Mercer's dead and even when he was alive he was a cryptic bastard. Four months of peace, or well, maybe not peace but obscurity, no people trying to shoot me with rocket launchers, no strike teams in APCs coming after me, no tanks swarming through the streets of New York with orders to fire at will. Most people would love it, from being enemy #1 to a nobody wearing the faces of dead people, and so long as I kept myself in check, which meant no killing even if the assholes annoyed the ever loving shit out of me then fine, that's what I'd do.

I managed like that for what? Three weeks before the feeling that something was missing came back, stronger this time and the sense that something had changed. Before I'd just been trying to figure out who the hell Alex Mercer was, now I was just...existing. Everyone thought I was dead, Blackwatch, Gentec, the military, Dana, but was that really better? Well, it was better for some people, Dana for one, so long as people thought I was dead, they would leave her alone.

But I was never meant to be an idle thing, I was never meant to just sit around and twiddle my thumbs while the government tried their damnest to cover up the whole blacklight outbreak. Ever since I'd woken up on that morgue table, I'd had a purpose, find out who I was, what I was, and I had, then it was to take out Greene and last had been to get rid of the nuke. I had nearly expected to die with that, I'd been ready to die, as strange as that concept may seem, I had wanted to die because I saw no reason to live beyond it, no reason. So what was my purpose now that I had survived? I needed a new objective and just calmly drifting by in post infected Manhattan wasn't going to give me a god damned reason to live. Maybe that's why I did it. Not because I was fucking bored of doing shit, not because I'm a homicidal maniac hell bent on the destruction of the human race, that was Greene, and even if I'd consumed her, I was still Alex Mercer, not to be confused with Alexander Mercer, the contraction's what'll get ya.

There's also the possibility I was lonely, yeah, probably a stupid reason to most people but then, they always had someone to relate to, something that they all had in common. That commonness, that familiarity is what made them all human after all, even the infected were still human in that respect, they had the other infected to liken themselves to, they only ever were contaminated humans anyway. Greene, me, Pariah, the three of us were special, there never was and never will be anything quite like us. Greene was the first, she carried all of the viruses, all of the different strains in her body and they had all died with her.

Pariah, well there wasn't much anyone knew about Pariah and maybe one day I'd go searching for him as well, he was interesting if nothing else. However, just because we were all apart from the human race, didn't mean we were like each other either, Greene was the incubator and vector of the virus, Pariah is a natural occurrence of the virus, me, I **_am_** the virus. I am the product of the virus being artificially cultivated and released, it finding a host body and modifying it to the extent that its host was no longer weak and fragile, no bones, no organs, no blood.

So you see, even in the small group of freaks, I'm still an outsider, how sad. It's almost second nature, don't you think, for a lone creature to seek out a companion. Some wolves go off on their own, humans call them loners, separate from any pack but that's not true, slowly but ever so surely, they go mad. You might say, 'but you're an incredibly powerful virus with hundreds of voices to pick from in your head, how could you ever get lonely?' and I would say, 'fuck off'. The voices in my head are only an extension of myself, as easy to control as extending your hand, their memories are mine, everything they knew, I do. Somehow my head isn't crammed full of thoughts and fragments of recollection, I blame that on the scientists, I also blame the damn curiosity on the scientists.

Still, the acting on the thoughts belong to me and me alone, and possibly to Alexander as well. As much as I distance myself from the man, as much as I loathe to reference anything that this body did as him, I will always have to admit he had good taste. Karen doesn't count as he was using her about as much as she was using him, that's just how things worked in Gentec, there was no such thing as friendliness amongst co-workers and I think most of them preferred it that way. Thinking about it like that, I can almost see why Alexander was the cynical, sociopathic bastard he was, only almost though.

It took me three weeks to figure out this new way of living wasn't for me, would have been sooner if I wasn't a stubborn ass but hey, that's just the way I am. Now I'm not going into any detail of what happened, how I remembered or how I even found out what the fuck went on, it's too damn long. However, I will tell you that having over a dozen scientists in your head comes in handy, especially those who specialised in biology, you know, for if you ever want to reanimate a corpse or two.

After Hades was born, the both of us left Manhattan, again, not going to say where we went because that's none of your fucking business. All you need to know is that, A) The Human race is full of selfish bastards B) Life gets boring after being American's most wanted and C) Being in control of shit is fun. We eventually made it back to Manhattan and now we're both on America's most wanted list, they've tried everything, hell, they even tried another nuke, this time we let it detonate, less work for us.

"You need to stop thinking so much." I rolled my eyes at that, as though I was the **_only_** guilty party, I call bull, sometimes Des just could get it out of his head that he used to be somebody else. I know how he feels, but the easiest way to forget about all that is to live in the moment, **_this_** moment, and I know exactly how to do just that.

"First one to the nest gets to top." So yes, I might be using the body of a dead scientist who was more of a monster than most people realised and yes I might have been useless and lonely for a bit but none of that mattered anymore. I found what Alexander had been thinking about before he died, the strongest memories come from those moments, and I've got a family of sorts, life's pretty good about now.

"Not a chance in hell you're topping two days in a row!" And yes, I know I started this little rant off with things that are improbable and should be impossible but some of those things are damn nice. Tentacles for one and their many myriad uses, having endless stamina and the experience of over a thousand dead people for another.

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**DEF: If there are any inconsistencies with Alex's character, I apologize for that, I haven't played either game and most of what I know comes from watching walkthroughs and reading the wiki pages.  
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_Bale: Just to clear up what happened in this AU for some, Alex reanimated Desmond's corpse and the two of them are now in control of Manhattan. The government thought it best they nuke the island again only this time Alex let the bomb detonate, most of what lives there now are reanimated corpses of infected persons. Also, if you like it, drop a review.  
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